Nintendo has filed for several patents for their upcoming home console codenamed NX. The patents were filed earlier this year and some of them have just been published, revealing a game console without an optical disc drive.

The USPTO patents were published yesterday, but refer to patents that were originally filed back in February 2014 in Japan, which means Nintendo has been working on the NX for a year and a half already.

The patent suggest a “Stationary Game Apparatus, Game Apparatus, Game System, Recording Medium and Speed Control Method” without any mention of an optical disc drive.

The filings specifically state that there will be no optical disc drive, “The example system is not provided with an optical disk drive for reading out a program and/or data from an optical disk”.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the Nintendo NX went with digital-only games. Digital sales have been taking over physical retail sales, and most gamers now prefer to buy the game digitally.

However, this isn’t the case on the Wii U, since the storage options are quite limited. If the NX has no optical drive, Nintendo must be including a rather large hard drive instead.